To a Girl Geek dinner in a pub in Brighton, dark and chatty and very busy.

The organisers were quite academic- all out of the COGs set up at Sussex, many of them nurtured by my old mate Ian. But the attendees were much more business minded, very much a networking event. Quite a lot of young women from small agencies around Brighton, interesting to find out just how many agencies there are.

With the possible exception of the main speaker Rosie, I was the oldest person there ( I put that down to lack of family commitments, not being 10 years behind in this new internet-thingy career. How I wish I had taken the advice all those years ago and learned this new fangled HTML coding back in 1995).

Anyway - Rosie took us through her project working on "portable electronic slates" for under 8 year olds; looks like fun, but SO far away way off anything commercially applicable that it clearly baffled some of the agency business-women. Wait till the 8 year olds are all 12, and then all homework will be done collectively via vast MySpace 8.0 group-think hives.

I complained to my companions that all the women speaking seemed to continually *apologise* for using the technology, "0h dear, this is the first time we've done this" "please bear with us .... er, which button do I press? "silly me, used to using a Mac.." but was countered by the argument that as women, the speakers felt relaxed in a group of other women, so didn't feel the pressure to be super-performing macho male-apers. Which is a good argument. Sank a pint of Budvar and went home.